


you're not waiting anymore

by flyicarus



Series: ashes and fire [1]
Category: Captain America (2011), Marvel (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-18
Updated: 2012-03-18
Packaged: 2017-11-02 04:13:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/364856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyicarus/pseuds/flyicarus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>bucky visits coney island in the spring of 2011.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're not waiting anymore

last time i was here, you were waiting. you’re not waiting anymore.  
the window’s broke and the smoke’s escaping, the books are scattered across the floor.  
and the church bells are ringing through the sirens,  
your coat was full of bullet holes.  
last time i was here, you were waiting. you’re not waiting anymore.  
\- ryan adams, "dirty rain"

 

+++++

 

If someone had asked Bucky Barnes at that exact moment what he was doing at Coney Island, he wouldn't have known what to say. The simple answer was that he hadn't realized he was going there until he suddenly was. The more complex answer, well.

Ever since he had found out that Steve was dead, or rather, had been declared dead not even a month after he fell into the ice, he hadn't known what to do with himself. He found himself drifting around the city aimlessly, revisiting places he and Steve had frequented before the war. The orphanage, abandoned now and boarded up, that Bucky had broken into just to sit in the room he had shared with Steve. The park, where Steve liked to sit and draw sometimes. The diner three blocks away from the grocer Steve had worked at, where they'd go for dinner if they had some money to spare.

And now, Coney Island.

Bucky remembered the amount of times that he had dragged Steve on all of the rides that anyone with his constitution had no right to be going on, and how Steve always got sick after. But he was right there with him, rubbing circles his back gently, soothing, and making jokes. Steve would always want to go on the ferris wheel after, because it was slow, and the air high up was cool and refreshing.

He remembered the double dates he'd arranged and how horrible most of the girls were to Steve, only seeing his slight frame and not how he was the best person anyone could ever know. He regretted now more than ever how many times he'd left Steve to go home on his own, so that he could fuck whatever dame had been his date that night. He should've stuck with Steve.

Fury had told him that what-if scenarios were a waste of time and an insult to the dignity of Steve's choice, but that sure as hell didn't stop Bucky from wondering whether if he hadn't fallen that day in the mountains, if he could've somehow saved Steve. Probably not; if anything, he would've been left behind in the car with Peggy and the Colonel, or he would've made it onto the plane with Steve, and they both would've died.

Bucky told himself that if that had happened, at least they would've been together.

It was raining the last time he and Steve had been to Coney, and it was raining now, and he figured that it might as well.

He had tried to go on a ride, the Cyclone, but before it had even started, the skies had opened, sparing him the effort of making a scene as he jerked out of the seat, heart aching and fearful of being sick.

His hands had been shaking and he'd left the ride so suddenly that people had stared after him anyway, and he heard them muttering lightly, but he hadn't cared. Not too much, anyway.

Instead of trying any more rides - god forbid he try the ferris wheel and get the seat that he and Steve had scratched their initials in so many years ago - he shoved his hands in his jacket pockets and meandered along the boardwalk, eventually walking out along the jetty as far out as he could go. The waves were growing, and he figured that there was a storm on the way. He didn't even have a hood, and the rain was hitting his skin and slicking down his hair, and he was just so completely miserable.

He remembered walking through the rain with Steve one day after school, and he had held a newspaper over Steve's head, shoved his jacket around his shoulders to ward off the chill in the air. They traded jokes and friendly insults on the way back to the orphanage, and he remembered thinking as Steve smiled at him and called him 'jerk' halfheartedly while nudging playfully at his shoulder, that he'd rather like that moment to last forever.

It hadn't, of course. Life had moved quickly for them, and then there had been the war, and the days bled together, especially once he was overseas and missing Steve so much it was like a constant ache in the middle of his chest. But life had changed again, and then it was Steve that people saw, Steve was the hero - or Captain America, really, and either way, Bucky still missed him, still felt that constant ache in his chest, at least until he realized that it wasn't Steve that had changed, not really. It was just his body, and the two of them were the same that they had always been.

Bucky would still follow him anywhere, and Steve was still the good man that he remembered, and maybe that's what led to their undoing.

He leaned against the worn wooden railing of the jetty, brow furrowed and lips pursed together, paying no heed to the increasing winds and the rain. His jacket kept him warm enough, and it's not like he was particularly noticing the world around him, anyway. All he could think of was the fact that Steve was gone, dead, and there hadn't been enough time, not for either of them, and Steve had died not knowing how Bucky felt, and maybe that was the worst thing of all.

He'd crashed that plane not knowing that he was someone's world entire, that Bucky would do anything for him, that he was the only thing that mattered, and now Bucky was left alone, grief-stricken and bereft, in a time that wasn't his own.

He had shipped out in the spring over seventy years ago and Steve had been left waiting.

He was waiting for Bucky, but he wasn't waiting anymore.

It was the spring of 2011 and now he was the one left waiting. Waiting for the pain to go away, waiting for the emptiness to swallow him whole, waiting to die, waiting for an absolution that would never come.

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by ryan adams' song "dirty rain."


End file.
